Wilshire Center

Carol Vena-Mondt uses old junk store black-and-white family-photo Christmas cards as springboards for large painted family portraits. Using only the bluish grays and whites of faded photos or those first ‘50s TV screens that aired “The Ed Sullivan Show,” she duplicates postwar families oozing with the prosperity and down-home propriety that briefly marked life before Sen. McCarthy and Korea.

“The Hennings” are here, for example, with their goofy, spectacled mom and pop and a brood of progeny that only a parent could love. Exaggerating and distorting features with deep dark shadows, Vena-Mondt selectively turns period portraits into universal Rorschach tests onto which we graft a history: Is that a flicker of Oedipal defiance in the teen-age son who refuses to pose just like Daddy? Comedic and grotesque, these Middle Americans unwittingly invite us to glimpse the dark drama behind all our post-card greetings.

Judie Bamber’s lonely painted objects interact with potent titles to produce a loud, mysterious echo. Two small paintings are called “Excuse Me for Living.” On the left is a lustrous gumdrop casting shadows on a bright, flat ground; on the right it is squished, its liquid contents spilling like viscera. Shiny and pristine as a Japanese koi study, “Oh Come On It Doesn’t Hurt That Much” is a teeny, frail and very dead goldfish. Bamber’s combination of damaged objects, loaded titles and seductive technique gets us thinking about personal vulnerability and the politics of intimacy, themes that become overt in the wry feminist statement “Closeness Is Easier When You Are Far Away.”

Finally, Tony Greene builds on photos of nude male torsos and museum dioramas of “real” (stuffed) forest animals in “natural” habitats. He embeds these in thick, honey-hued varnishes and paints decorative florals around and through them, toying with distinctions between nature and artifice, fake and real. In “His Broken Lines,” traces of an erotic male torso entwined with baroque thorns hints at crucifixion and the idea that religion and art bear the same proxy relationship to genuine passion that a stuffed deer bears to a romping doe. (Jan Baum, 170 S. La Brea Ave., to June 3.).